I've lost 80 pounds since October, motherfuckers. Still a long way to go. I had reached crisis point and had been actively avoiding scales since Oskar dropped because I knew the news wasn't good. It wasn't. Like, 263 pounds not good. So 80 pounds later, I'm at 183, I'm a size 12, and the smallest I've been since I was about 13 or 14 years old. I'm wearing a t-shirt my grandmother bought for me in 8th grade (and she's been dead for 8 years). If I want to hit the right BMI, I need to lose another 60-ish pounds, but hey! I'm not morbidly obese anymore! Just regular obese!

I work for a knitting designer who gives me free yarn, pays me to knit projects for her, I work 3 days a week, she pays me 12 dollars an hour, and I roll in and out whenever I feel like it.

My husband is hot shit. My kid is a fucking genius.

FUCK YES ME.

On a side note, intensive therapy and the worst 8 months of my life spent trying different medications before I found the wonder of Lamictal may have a lot to do with this. But my depressive symptoms have been gone, GONE, for the first time since I was 12, for almost a year. Never leave me, sweet sweet Lamictal.

not really one for new year's resolutions. i find that i'm still the same person come january 1st so trying to bullshit myself that, i dunno, this year i'm gonna get hot or whatever is useless. arbitrary deadlines mean zilch to me. the only success i've had is with knitting resolutions so these are the projects i would like to make this year.


a sweater for mom (iced, knitty 2010)
a sweater for dave (avast, knitty 2006? maybe)
a sweater for ruby
a shawl for mom (swallowtail shawl)
a shawl for me (ishbel)
what the hell, another shawl (haruni)
lizard ridge blanket
finish the sudoku blanket
february lady sweater for someone who is not me.

and finally the big one: reduce my stash by 15 types of yarn. YEAH I SAID IT. probably impossible but i worry that dave is starting to kind of lose patience with my yarn buying so i'm going to make an effort.

my christmas went well. i loved being with my family and osky has learned how to open presents, so he was a happy camper on christmas day--he ran to his presents and grabbed one and looked back at us, like "are you gonna yell at me for touching this?" then when we said it was ok he demolished them. he really makes me such a happy mom. he went back to two naps a day in pittsburgh plus the 13 hours at night. it was awesome.

i also got a cuisinart food processor from my mom. it's truly a thing of beauty and i'm looking forward to making pizza dough with it--right now i use my kitchenaid mixer for it but i've read that processors are actually better for dough so i'm excited about it.

for our christmas present to each other dave and i decided to stay at the william penn hotel in downtown pittsburgh for two nights, with the idea that dave was finally going to get to see some of pittsburgh (it's embarrassing, we've been together for 6 years and he's spent no time in the city whatsoever) and we were going to have a little holiday from being parents and whatever. well the night before we left for the william penn i got the goddamned stomach flu. it lasted for about 8 hours, but i was a fountain of horrible bodily fluids. i threw up so hard my nose started bleeding and whenever i'd start yakking again it would start bleeding again. all i could do was lie on my mom's couch and cry and try to get david to kill me. i've been through labor with a 9 and a half pound baby and pitocin and no epidural during transition and i swear, with god as my witness, this fucking stomach flu was WORSE. i honestly just wanted to die. i begged them to take me to a hospital but my mom said (since she'd already had it) it would be over in a few hours and i'd be ok. she was right, of course, but being up all night yakking had totally exhausted me but i dragged my dead ass out of bed and drove dave and i down to pittsburgh the next day anyway. and of course that first night i passed out from exhaustion and the next day dave got the fucking stomach flu. so it was a waste of time and money and was the worst christmas present ever. not anyone's fault just real fucking unfortunate.

and of course everyone who came into contact with my mom, who was the typhoid mary in this case, caught the stomach flu EXCEPT for Oskar and my brother. dammit.

we flew home new year's eve. osky hadn't slept on the plane so we put him to bed at 5 pm and he slept till 9 am the next morning. dave and i took a nap and woke up at 9 pm and watched mr. show on ifc until midnight. we kissed and went to bed. i didn't think i would get to the point where new year's eve failed to excite me before i was 30 but yet here i am. 26 and like omg soooooooooooooo bored with everything.

i'm on 30 mg of prozac and it was working really well but the ennui is staring to creep back.

oskar knows how to tickle people now, and his vocabulary is growing in a weird way--he says yowza and mudbutt. i mean he says more than that but those are the funniest. when he needs a diaper change and you don't notice he'll start telling you "mudbutt! mudbutt!" except it's "mabaah! mabaah!"

and now to go back underground for another 6 months or whatever. i'm a san francisco groundhog.

I told Dave last night that he's lucky that he's the man and I'm the woman in this relationship, because if the roles were reversed, I would be intolerable.

"I would be such an asshole to you. I would wake you up by beating off in your face just to be a dick. I would constantly be trying to bang you in public. I would be unstoppable. Your vagina would look like a stepped-on Arby's sandwich."

I think at this point it's safe to say I really have no time for other moms. I think maybe I just don't get it maybe. I don't want to talk about Oskar all the time. He's awesome, but to other people you have to understand that your kid is honestly about as important as your pets. And you wouldn't talk about your pets all the time, would you?

I also don't get the constant documenting of your kids life. At his Gymboree classes the other parents are like fucking paparazzi. Which is super annoying and it also means that there are pictures of Oskar up on other people's facebooks (let's not kid ourselves, every fucking picture is going on fb). In fact you know what, take all the pictures you want. But fucking quit with the facebook. THE BABY LOOKS THE SAME AS YESTERDAY COME ON NOW.

I don't know, it just pisses me off. There is a woman I used to work for, who has recently had a baby and every fucking post is about a baby, or about not being able to do something because she has a baby, or how wonderful life is because she had a baby. It's disappointing. You can really love your kid and maintain your own identity. It's not like the minute the baby squirts out of you your name is legally changed to "Mom".

I dunno. Maybe I don't love Osk enough. Prepare for daily posts about his poo content and the fact that he is now taking steps while holding onto stuff (this last bit is true, actually).

I can summarize this post thusly: Everything breeds. Get over it.

I wrote this poem while I was in UCSF's Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital, on their locked ward, when Oskar was 9 days old.

you keep your joy
when it's there, when
the roads are warm in the evening
and fireflies are
strobing in the fields as
you drive by
you keep your joy
when it's christmas time and
you're waiting for your gifts to be opened
you keep it, you
memorise it, you lock it inside
the deepest part of your soul
so when your joy is gone
you have a chance to find it


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My capacity to humiliate myself has only shrunk slightly since I was 13. It's pretty impressive. My life is like one long, cringe-inducing episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, except I'm not a millionaire and Larry David has more friends than I do.

1. Lost. I have never seen an episode of Lost. I know Matthew Fox is in it, and Hurley is fat, and there is a smoke monster, and there was a polar bear in the first season, and... Locke is dead? Is that his name? The guy from The Stepfather? And these things I know because I have a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. I feel like I might be missing something, but I've seen the entire series of The Wire, so I'm better than you. Hah.

2. Glee. I'm never even going to go down to the dock to look at this particular boat because I fucking hate musicals so much. Oh God I hate musicals. And I hate when someone says "Oh but this one is different, you'll like this one" This has happened to me multiple times and IT IS NEVER DIFFERENT IT IS STILL A MUSICAL AND IT STILL SUCKS. The only exceptions are Rocky Horror and Hedwig. Translation: I like singing trannies. Everything else can die in a fire.

3. Avatar. Everyone who has seen this tells me "The movie is crap but you have to see it for the spectacle." I love movies and this is like... A giant contradiction to me. Why would I pay my hard-earned (well, Dave's hard-earned) cash to reward James Cameron for shitty writing and characters. I don't know, I'm just not interested in Fancy FernGully, you know?

4. The Olympics. I have tried multiple times to care about the Olympics, my mom keeps yelling at me to be patriotic and cheer for the US, and it's not like I'm purposely not cheering for the US.... Listen I know a lot of people like the Winter Olympics and that's great. If I managed to catch some figure skating I'd be all over it, except every time I turn on NBC its the goddamned biathalon (seriously I have caught the biathalon THREE DIFFERENT TIMES) and once it was cross-country skiing. Watching Oskar poop is more interesting than cross-country skiing. Anyway, I've been trying to figure out why I like the summer Olympics and not the winter ones, and I think I have it: I really like that in the Summer Olympics, theoretically, anyone can do it. Anyone can run or swim or jump, you know? The entire world can participate. But the winter Olympics is only for rich white people, you know? Who has access to ice rinks to practice, or bobsled tracks, or big snowy mountains to ski down? Rich white people. Yeah I know there's Koreans and Chinese and Japanese people in the Olympics. So let me broaden it: rich people. And to me, that's not what the Olympics is about. I like the democracy of foot races and stuff. Not watching rich people ski. If that makes any sense.

5. If I have crapped on something you like, I apologise, and I want you to know that I don't look down on you for enjoying these things, they are just things I don't enjoy. I think the world today is too full of people who want to the world to fit binary definitions: if you're not for this you're against this. I hated breastfeeding. Someone who breastfed may have the kneejerk reaction of "are you saying I'm wrong for breastfeeding?" No, dude, no. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean no one else is permitted to like it. If you like Lost and Glee and the Olympics and Avatar that's cool. Maybe one day you can convince me I'm an idiot. Not that it would be hard to do.

Did I mention my kid is in 12 month old clothes? And he's 4 and a half months?

But he also rolls around and drinks from a sippy cup sometimes and he's been on solids since he was 2 and a half months and he laughs a lot and he likes sitting up and he's the coolest thing in the world. Second to Dave of course.

a friend of mine, one of the few friends i have here in san francisco, died suddenly this morning. i feel fine except for when i think "oh by the way you'll never see caia again." her knitting project was a hat for oskar which i will try to finish for him. i'm just, fuck, man, what the fuck.

joanie from america's next top model cycle 6 keeps popping up on my facebook as a person i may know. yes, i know her, but i refuse to friend her on the basis of how unnecessarily sexy her profile picture is. put some clothes on, girl! being on tv does not give you the right to get naked all over my facebook!

So. Right.

During my pregnancy, unsurprisingly, I got emotional and sensitive. And aggressive, let's not forget the testosterone I was exposed to that made me aggressive and furry (oh God, I was so furry, it was so gross). What I'm saying is, right from day one of me being knocked up, I was really sensitive and it didn't take much to hurt my feelings--the only person, surprisingly, who didn't get the full force of my tears and hurt feelings was Dave and that's because he's so freaking nice that being mad at him is like kicking a puppy.

I found myself getting hurt feelings a LOT and whether or not they were qualified wasn't really the point--I would spend time ruminating over people who hadn't spoken to me once I said I was pregnant who I thought were good friends of mine, or friends who I felt at the time were totally uninterested in me whenever we spoke, or any other various reasons. Now I want to add that this is all totally in my head, and in retrospect I was probably just being retardedly sensitive. But I didn't want any conflict and I didn't want to spend time feeling hurt through my whole pregnancy. So I stopped talking to the people who made me feel hurt without explaining why to them or giving them a chance to tell me "stop being retarded, preggo mcfeebs." So super-passive-aggressively I deleted a lot of people from my Facebook, either because they had hurt my feelings in some stupid way or because I honestly thought they didn't give a damn about me and they wouldn't miss me on FB. To be honest, most of the people I deleted haven't seemed to notice, so those were probably justified, but there are a few people who did notice, and I feel like a shithead about it. So, to the people I stopped speaking to, I'm really, really sorry, and I am a shithead, and you don't have to start talking to me because I certainly wouldn't forgive me, but dammit, I suck, and pregnancy sucks, and I'm sorry I was irrational and lame.

I'm working on the story of the weeks after Oskar was born, when I had to check myself into the psychiatric hospital at UCSF for two days and then had to do a partial hospitalisation programme because I lost my damn mind, but frankly it still sucks and hurts to think about it so it's slow going, but one day I will finish it because frankly I don't want to forget how painful and awful it was--because it makes me so grateful that when I look Oskar now all I feel is "goddammit this kid is awesome!!!"